


Please don't try to serenade me (I am a one-man band)

by Ellarend



Series: I know it's warmer where you are [3]
Category: Terminator: Dark Fate
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:08:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22829977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellarend/pseuds/Ellarend
Summary: Sooooo...instead of finishing the two on-going fics...I really had to start this one.A lot more swearing than Don't Wake Me Up or Because I Know You - it's Sarah freakin' Connor.
Relationships: Dani Ramos/Grace, Sarah Connor/Dani Ramos
Series: I know it's warmer where you are [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1551895
Comments: 13
Kudos: 25





	Please don't try to serenade me (I am a one-man band)

**Author's Note:**

> Sooooo...instead of finishing the two on-going fics...I really had to start this one. 
> 
> A lot more swearing than Don't Wake Me Up or Because I Know You - it's Sarah freakin' Connor.

This is something Sarah Connor knows: she does NOT need this shit. Honestly, she really doesn’t. 

She’s in some crummy motel in the middle of Mexico, and the bartender she’s bought home is cowering under the sheets by the head of the bed as her boyfriend pounds on the door. What was supposed to be an evening of fun has turned into goddamn Drama with a capital D, and Sarah couldn’t be in less of the mood for it. 

She pulls on cargo pants and a shirt and swigs from the bottle on the table, rolls her eyes to the ceiling in a plea for strength, and pulls open the door. The guy on the other side is young, muscled, and by the set of his jaw and the look in his eyes had been working himself up to violence...but when Sarah opens the door, grey haired and older and much, much more _female_ than he’s expecting, she can see him deflate, change gears, wind down. 

As his ire drains, though, hers rises - it's like some magic trick, the way she gets dismissed since her hair lost its colour and her eyes gained their crows feet, and she hates it. She’s gotten so sick and tired of feeling _lesser_ , unworth the effort, and if he’s not going to start it, well...fuck it, she sure as hell will. She lines up a few good zingers to spit at him before he can say the _sorry, wrong room_ that she can see approaching like an oncoming train (and fuck him for assuming she couldn't get a woman like this into her room). 

She’s in luck. Behind her, the woman calls out his name tentatively, and this _is_ the age of equal opportunities, after all: after a moment of slack-jawed gaping, he does a one-eighty, bolsters himself, draws deep from his well of assholery and leans right into her face, “You got my girl in there?”

“Got a _woman_. Didn’t see your name on her,” She lets a smirk pull at the corner of her mouth, “And I looked everywhere.” 

That pushes a button. He’s putting so much into it now, flexing and leaning forward and cursing at her. Spittle brushes her cheek. She appreciates the effort, she really does. Can barely keep herself from smiling. All this posturing: It warms her. She feels seen. 

“-better let her out here, right now!” He’s saying, trying to peer around her. One hand comes to rest on the door; he tests her, pressing a little. She doesn’t budge. 

“ _Let_ her out? Sweetheart,” She hikes an eyebrow suggestively, puts just the right tone to her voice to annoy, "If she's here, she's choosing to be."

Though, maybe not for much longer: even as she's barring the door, she can hear soft Spanish sentences as the woman fumbles frustratedly for her clothing, ramming legs into skinny jeans not designed for a quick get-away and fumbling under the bed for her underwear. It gets Sarah’s goat, it really does, that this woman is pandering to this cave-man fuck, this posturing pathetic meat-head. Why shouldn't women do what the hell they want, and why shouldn't they be ab...- she's halfway through that thought when the woman pushes past her unceremoniously, rudely, with eyes only for the man. 

On seeing the woman, the mans' attention drops from Sarah; she can feel his dismissal like a slap, now that ‘his girl’ is here and he can yell at her instead. Jesus. She’s completely ignored as they turn away, bickering across the motel courtyard. 

Which, no, this isn’t good enough. A) How dare she be dismissed as if she’s fucking invisible and B) If they both disappear, she’ll be left with nothing to distract from the phone that’s mocking her from the Lays Flamin’ Hot bag at the bottom of her duffel; nothing to take her mind off the series of numbers marking a location, a line that specifies a date that's fast approaching, and the devastating sign-off that she can only bare to read once: For John. 

She feels her heartbeat in her chest, feels it thump-thump-thump into her ears, her brain, her fingertips, feels the skin on her back begin to crawl in a way that’s only been happening the last few years, and now her ears hurt, her breath feels too shallow, and…

She’s not sure what she says but it’s enough for the man to turn back, lips in a snarl, “Say that again, you stupid old-”

_There_ it is: the licence for her rage, the trigger for her release. The symptoms leave in a giddy rush. He doesn’t even finish his sentence before her boot is between his legs and, as he bends over himself, her elbow lands on the back of his neck, dropping him. 

The woman - the one that Sarah had been getting along so well with not fifteen minutes previously - spits _Bitch_ and launches herself forward, and Sarah grins. 

This is something Sarah Connor knows: if she's thinking about violence, and blood, and sweat, she's not thinking about the text.

*

An hour later, she’s thirty minutes away, rubbing sore knuckles and stretching her back out as best she can in the confines of the driver's seat. She’s feeling a twinge of pain in her back that she’s trying to ignore, knows she wouldn’t have felt it ten years ago, pulls her lips together in a tight frown as she drives. 

She’s deliberately not heading to the coordinates on the text message. She pretends she’s not even thinking about them, that her internal compass - refined after so many years of illicit travel - isn’t telling her _exactly_ the direction those coordinates point. 

She keeps the car pointing the other way, and drinks again, and that's when it happens: the flash of colour in the rear view that's too close to be outside the car. Her hands tighten involuntarily; the car jerks a foot onto the on-coming lane before she corrects it. God _dammit_ she thought she was over this... tries to ignore the skin-crawl that’s starting across her shoulders, her scalp, like someone’s sitting in the back seat, because every damn instinct she has tells her someone _is_ , but she knows from experience that if she turns around, no-one will be there.

Suddenly, everything inside her is on edge. Desperately trying to hold on to her fight-high, she’s avoiding looking in the rear-view, even the side-view mirrors, because...she doesn't want it to happen again. Doesn't want to see that flash of movement, the glimpse of brown hair, of a checked shirt, of torn jeans. Never the whole damn picture, just a glimpse. She keeps staring straight ahead at the dry landscape, takes another swig from the bottle between her thighs, and keeps driving. 

*

She doesn’t care about the texts, she thinks, not this time. She’s given _enough_ , and now she’s a broken body supporting a fractured mind and she’s _done_ , goddammit. Weren’t the last two enough? Isn’t it someone else's turn to put their ass on the line and go toe-to-toe with Robbie the Robots' insane cousin? Not counting her original two encounters (and, y'know, all the time in the mental institution) she feels like answering the call of the last two texts - the killer blonde bitch in LA and the wall-street-looking mother-fucker in San Fransisco - has put her, points-wise, faaaar ahead of the entire rest of humanity, and fuck them - she's done. 

But...there is always the thought...always the point of contention in her mind that, well, she was never able to find the one that...the Machine that...well, she was just never able to find _him_. Once she got her shit together enough after...what happened...he'd just _disappeared_. You think it'd be real easy to find a gigantic, mono-syllabic white dude in Guatemala, but he was just...nowhere. She genuinely thought, when she received the first text out of no-where, that this was it - the location of the one that got away, but no. None of them have looked like _him_ , none of them have been _him_...and she’d dearly love to break that beefy fuck to pieces. Certainly has the fire-power for it these days, she’s made sure of that.

But...she's not sure she can take it, this time, if it's not him. Not sure her heart will cope. 

So. Not this time. Apathy trumps anger, for now, and really, the world can go fuck itself. What the hell has it ever given her? A dead son and a life on the run. Great. Really, what the hell is there in this world to fight for anymore?...Okay, if she thinks for a moment, she'll admit...she does love potato chips. And okay, there's whiskey. And bourbon. And dildos. Okay, so there are a few great things the world has given her. Maybe just one or two.

So, she decides: she's taking back the power in her life. She decides: she's not driving anywhere on the say-so of a mysterious asshole texter. She makes up her mind: unless future texts have anything to do with whiskey, potato chips, sex toys or various other types of hard liquor, she's staying put, because those are the only things she wants out of life from now on. 

She decides a lot of things on that drive, first and foremost: She is one hundred percent over, literally could give less of a shit, that someone is trying to use her to save the world, like it’s some kind of fucking… _fate_ planned out for her. Nope. 

Nope. 

*

What she decides she does care about (apart from whiskey and liquor and sex) is how heavy they seem to be making guns these days, and how hot the sun seems to be now (damn global warming); how much it drains her, much more quickly than it seemed to before.  
What she cares about is how her left knee aches (it must have been that last terminator, getting a lucky hit, and it’s never gotten better. That’s it).  
What she cares about are a hundred other things like: how dazzling they’re making headlights now; how much salt and sugar seems to be in all the food; how much more often she has to pee; how uncomfortable they’re making motel beds and it’s making a mess of her back; the goddamn acid reflux thats keeping her up half the night and only seems to abate if she can keep her thoughts away from texts and terminators and saving the world. 

This is something Sarah Connor knows: it all, every part of it, every single part of it, makes her angrier than she knows how to express, so she doesn’t try to. She ignores it all, sleeps around, drinks an amount that she's pretty sure is sending her crazy, gets horrendous fucking heartburn when she’s angry. And she always has fucking heartburn. 

*

She still doesn’t care about the text the next day. Nope. She proves it by sitting in a tiny bar all day, and in the evening, she heads to the nearest place that looks like it might be more fun, sinks a few drinks, hustles a few people at pool and eventually her eyes rest on a middle-aged woman sitting by herself at the bar, a little too much make-up, a little too short a skirt. Sarah looks closer - she’s attractive despite the make-up, curvy and rounded and Sarah really thinks her night is looking up. She cocks her head, waits. No men approach her; she doesn’t appear to be with anyone. She’s giving off nervous vibes, playing with her drink, glancing furtively around. 

Sarah grins to herself, and moves in for the kill. 

*

Sarah’s Spanish is great, but extremely...specific. You don’t live on the run in a country and not pick up some extremely obscure vocabulary, and you don’t live the sort of lifestyle that Sarah does without doing the same. She accidentally offends the woman twice before she manages to smooth things over, and then it doesn’t take her long to get her point across: after some flirting, they head back to her motel. 

_Fuck you, fate,_ Is all Sarah can think with a bitter little smile later that night, as texts and terminators seem far from her reality of sweat and whiskey and make-up smeared pillow-cases. 

This is something Sarah Connor knows: spending the night wrapped around another human chases away thoughts of killer robots from the future. 

* 

She’s angry, though, the next morning: her traitorous brain has somehow already calculated the distance between where she is now and where the text wants her to be, and she knows that if - _if_ \- she decided to go, she’d need to leave by tomorrow morning at the latest. 

She knows she won’t. She _knows_. This is something Sarah Connor knows: she is not fates’ fucking toy. She settles back in the bed, opens a packet of potato chips, sets her mind to enjoy a little peace and quiet...but the idea of the text keeps popping up in her mind, turning the salty chips to ash in her mouth. She keeps working her way through the bag stubbornly, but she’s just getting angrier that her morning of chips and alone time is feeling tainted by something she can’t even goddamn control. 

What’s worse, is around the edges of everything, she can feel this high-grade tension. Not the life-and-death, pain-or-victory tension she normally feels, that she _enjoys_ , but a tension that twangs at her nerves, puts tension in her jaw, in her back, in the centre of her chest. She can feel...something. Something pressing and pulling.

Suddenly, she feels short of breath, in a way that she won’t ever admit scares her. It’s not the first time. It’s like there’s a weight on her chest, like when she takes an in breath, she won’t be able to expel it, it’ll just get stuck there and she’ll choke. Her head starts to pound, and she feels like she’s a split fucking milisecond from hyperventilating all the damn time, and the feeling can last for _days_. She wondered, to start with, if the smoking had caught up with her, but the back-room docs and back-alley quacks she reluctantly visited said no, her lungs sounded clear. 

One suggested it might be anxiety. She cursed him out in every language she knew and trashed half his clinic as she left. Afterwards, she set his car on fire (...not while he was _in it_ \- she’s not a fucking _monster_ ). Fuck him: it’s definitely not anxiety. Someone who’s killed Terminators doesn’t get the luxury - the weakness - of that. 

So, she’s angry. She finishes her potato chips, smashes the packet into an angry ball and throws it at the tv, which it misses by a mile. 

“Fuck.” It’s all she can think to say, and it seems to summarise her state of mind perfectly. 

*

She wasn’t planning to go out till tonight; was planning an afternoon of self-medication, self-love and the really good potato chips she saves for special occasions, but by 1pm she’s pacing a groove into the carpet of the shitty room, and the Bourbon isn’t warming her, it’s setting her brain cells onto collision courses and making her queasy. She has a shower, but as she steps out, she _swears_ she sees movement in the mirror. It is paired with the absolute belief in the truth that there might be someone there, and she spins on her feet so quickly she threatens to overbalance on the wet floor. 

“Fuck _you_ ,” she spits. Seeing things again is _not_ on her list of things to do today. 

So, she goes to a bar in the afternoon, picks up a guy who’s drunk enough to be in a bar at 2pm, but not so drunk that he’s not interested in some afternoon delight. Beer settles her stomach, and allows the subsequent bourbon to slide down smoothly. 

The sex is actually pretty damn good, but by 5pm he’s spent, making excuses to leave, and she’s faced with the yawning chasm of an evening without distraction, without the absence of thought. Her alcohol soaked mind blows it off, to start with, but as the hours pass, the beers that follow seem to sober her up in a way that feels awful and unnecessary. 

At 8pm, she heads out to the vending machine. While she’s stood there, mind a blank as she stares at the myriad of options, there’s a flash of colour. It’s a reflection in the scratched glass of the machine that her eye catches, but the shot of adrenaline that passes through her tells her _exactly_ what - who - it is. 

“No,” The panic that overwhelms her is sudden, sharp, tingles at the back of her throat like vomit. “You’re not _real_. And you can’t make me change my mind.” 

Mechanically, she makes herself dig out change from her pocket with fingers that suddenly feel sausage-like and clumsy, staring at herself in the glass, refusing to let her eyes slide even a millimeter from their glassy counterparts in case she sees it again. The skin on the back of her neck prickles, as if someone is staring with laser-like intensity at that spot. The feeling moves, travels across her shoulders and down her spine and fuckfuckfuck _fuck_ this is not real. It’s not. It hasn’t been before, and it won’t be now, but it gets her the same way every damn time anyway. 

She transfers her gaze to the safety of the coin slot. Coins drop into the machine, one, two, and then she fumbles a third. It tumbles to the concrete, and she stares at it for a moment, before slowly crouching. She knows she won’t be able to resist and she doesn’t: as she reaches for it, she takes a lightning fast glance under her arm. 

The relief that floods her on not seeing black Air Jordans topped by torn jeans almost sends her reeling into the vending machine. She scrabbles for the money with movements now jerky with adrenalin and relief, and slams the last coin in, picking a packet of something at random. 

This is something Sarah Connor knows: She’s not going crazy. She’s okay. She’s okay, and she’s _not_ going to save the world. Not this time. 

*

Still, when she gets back to the room, she’s lost her beer/bourbon buzz, she has no-one to distract her, and she can’t lose that feeling at the edge of her mind that something’s not quite right. When she’s in the bathroom, she expects to see something behind her in the mirror. When the TV’s not on, sometimes she can see movement reflected in it, but when she focuses, it’s gone. 

The weight is back on her chest; her breaths feel incomplete, somehow jagged, too-fast and shallow, and her thoughts are chasing each other at a pace she hates but can't seem to stop. She tries to calm herself, tries another drink, paces the room, but nothing seems to be working and her body feels like it's full of pins and needles, tingling and crazed. She lasts another hour, before she storms into the bathroom, grips the sides of the sink, and raises her gaze to the mirror. 

She doesn't know what to do, and she feels crazy doing _this_. Hates herself for even entertaining the thought but... 

This is something Sarah Connor knows: Ghosts aren't real. But maybe...just maybe...she'd like them to be?

She wouldn't have admitted that before. Wouldn't have thought that way before...before his memory became... _fucking fuzzy_ and _unclear_.

“Show yourself.” It’s a hoarse whisper, one that she hardly recognises as her own. “Come _on_.” And she's staring at her own desperate, bloodshot eyes, her lank hair, her sallow skin. God _damn_ she looks awful, but she can't look away. 

“ _Show yourself!_ ” She can’t bring herself to put volume under the words. They’re harsh and quiet and desperate. She doesn’t want to see him. She doesn’t. It would be too hard. But if she could maybe just sneak a peek for a second...? Maybe, god, _maybe_ she’d be able to, to refresh her mental image of him. Flesh out the lines. Redraw the angles. Make it _whole_. The alcohol in her veins pounds through her brain - the little light above the sink suddenly seems too bright. She takes a deep breath.

“I know what you want.” Her voice is stronger; sounds a little more like _hers_ to her ears. “And I’m not changing my mind. I’m not going.” 

She pauses. Feels the dichotomy of her reality - cold tiles under worn socks, aching hands gripping porcelain, the ache in her back, versus the tingling of her skin, the movement at the corner of her eye, the _hope-dread_ that there’s something here. She strains, and she strains, but nothing appears in the mirror, nothing happens except the constant feeling of _company_ , and fuck if this whole thing isn't really starting to piss her off. 

She turns away, swearing, letting go of the idea of ghosts and visitations and realising that she's just a drunk, haunted, crazy old woman in a shitty motel bathroom...and that’s when it happens. Just for a second, she swears she hears...something, a voice calling her. This is new. 

It's weird: It’s not like she hears it properly: it’s like it arrives in her ear whole and complete and mainlines to her brain in a way she _really_ doesn’t like, because it still feels _real_. And it’s not John. 

“Kyle…?” She whispers. This is too much, it’s just too fucking much. 

And then she throws up. 

A lot. 

*

Somehow, the act of chucking up what appears to be gallons of sour alcohol brings her back to reality in a way nothing else could. When she's sure she's done and can bare to lift herself off the wonderfully cold floor, she runs a towel under the cold tap and wraps it around her whole head, groaning in relief. The cold cuts through her nausea; the drips that travel uncomfortably under her collar ground her, reminding her she’s real and whole and here. 

She sits on the edge of the bath, and peers out from the towel, eyeing herself in the mirror. It's sobering, what she sees, how different it is from the bad-ass she thinks she is - imagines herself to be - and she can't look for too long before wrapping the towel around her head again. 

“Fuck,” She manages from within the cold towel turban, resting her head in her hands for just a moment. “Fuck. Okay. I’ll do it.” 

This is something Sarah Connor knows: she was always going to, anyway.


End file.
